Turning the Funnel on its Side

Posted on October 19, 2017

There’s a lot of talk these days about marketing funnels.

Want to sell something? Just create a funnel they say. Find a group wanting a product. Create the product. Set up a landing page and create ads that will send them there. Test and tweak until you get the best cost per click and the funnel gives you more than what you spent. And once they sign up, try to sell them more stuff.

That’s the trick in a nutshell.

But the problem with this is that it’s spammy, the smarter people know this and Facebook doesn’t like it. And another problem is that Facebook has the power over ads. They have the power to increase the cost per click whenever they want and that’s what they will keep doing. As prices rise marketers using this tactic have no choice but to increase the promise for an irresistible offer making it even more spammy.

As more marketers use these tactics, it gets noisy for the consumer. Most people fall for it once or maybe twice only to find information they could find for free. But once you get burned, you tend not to do it again. You tend not to trust the next ad – whether their providing value or not.

What we do know is that when there’s a lot of noise people turn to trusted advisors. People that are recommended by friends. People who’ve earned trust over time. People that have consistently shown up with generosity for years. Never overselling anyone.

So turn the funnel on it’s side.

Instead of seeing a funnel in the traditional sense where people enter the top and have a few come out the bottom – think of turning the funnel on its side and giving it to your customers to use as a megaphone.

But that means you have to change your focus from trying to find the next tactic to trying to give an incredible amount of value worth sharing.

No doubt, this doesn’t happen overnight. It’s what we call the long game but if done right, the results are ever lasting.